Scones with cream and strawberry jam

For a truly British afternoon tea.

For the scones:

1/2 lime

90ml full fat milk

a few drops of vanilla essence

170g plain flour

2 teaspoons baking powder, 

Generous pinch of salt

40g cold butter

2 tablespoons white granulated sugar

More flour for rolling

1 egg

Heat the oven to around 200C.

Squeeze the lime.

Heat the milk till warm but not boiling.

Add the lime and vanilla essence to the milk.

Sieve together the flour, the baking powder and the salt.

Cut the butter up into small pieces and add that to the flour. 

Rub it in with fingers until it looks like bread crumbs then add the sugar and stir.

Put the baking tin in the oven.

Pour some flour on to the work surface ready for kneeding the dough.

Pour the liquid into the dry ingredients and use a knife to cut and stir. 

Once it forms a dough, move it on to the floured work surface.

Make sure your hands and your rolling pin are also floured.

Fold it over three or four times to make it more dough like, then roll it to about 4cm thick. 

Use a cookie cutter to cut the scones - you should get about 4 scones from this mix.

Brush with egg and put on the baking tray. 

Check the progress whilst cooking.

Serve with strawberry jam and vanilla cream

For real authenticity, this should be clotted cream and I recently learned how to do this, but since it takes around 10 - 12 hours in a low heat in the oven, we will make do with regular whipped cream.

 For me, I prefer the sweetness to come from the jam, but the scones aren't very sweet so decide what you would prefer.

Eat with cucumber, tomato or ham sandwiches (triangles, crusts cut off), a selection of pastries and cakes, and a pot of tea for a traditional English afternoon tea.

Vanilla cream

For the whipped cream

100 ml cream

A few drops vanilla essence

If you want you cream slightly sweetened, you could add some icing sugar.

Whisk the ingredients together. They can then go back in the fridge in an airtight container before serving, but it will pick up any other flavours in the fridge, so do this with care.

Quick and easy strawberry jam

For the strawberry jam:

10 frozen strawberries

3 tablespoons sugar

 

Chop up the strawberries and cook them, with the liquid they leaked while chopping, slowly in a pan for around 15 minutes until it forms a jam like consistency. 

Chocolate Truffles

Today on the kids' cooking club, we made chocolate truffles. 

The recipe is extremely easy and the end result is extremely good.

In this case we used 100 grams of good quality, high cocoa chocolate and 100 millilitres of cream. Plus a pinch of salt and some cocoa for rolling the truffles in. You could also roll them in coconut, crushed nuts, or dip them in melted chocolate.

You will also need a pyrex dish with a lip that fits over a pan to hold it, some baking paper, some disposable gloves, and a dish that can hold the truffle mix overnight before rolling.

This makes about 12 - 15 truffles.

 

First chop up the chocolate and put it in a heatproof dish above some boiling water - this must be lower than the bowl with the chocolate.

When the chocolate has melted, stir it through with a fork and take it off the heat.

Clean the fork in whatever way makes you happiest.

Warm the cream in a pan and just before it starts to boil, add it to the chocolate, together with a pinch of salt.

Stir it quickly so that the chocolate doesn't harden. If it hardnes a bit, it is ok, you'll have some delicious chocolate lumps in your truffles.

When it's is thoroughly mixed, you should have a glossy chocolate mix.

Clean the fork in whatever way makes you happiest

Pour the mixture into a baking paper lined bowl and put in the fridge for at least 4 hours, but ideally overnight.

Again, clean the utensils in whatever way you choose.

The next day

Sieve some cocoa powder onto a plate.

 

Take a truffle sized piece of the cold mixture, Roll it into a ball, then roll it around the cocoa powder.

Eat and enjoy.

Laap meatballs with tomato jeow sauce

We made Lao fusion food this week. Pork laap meatballs with tomato jeow sauce.

First we made the jeow - a smoky, spicy Lao dipping sauce.

We threaded the ingredients on to skewers - some tomatoes, shallots, garlic and chilli,

Sometimes it's hard putting the skewer through the shallots so you need to watch your fingers.

and put them on a barbecue to cook.

Once they were done, we put the shallots, garlic and chilli in a pestle and mortar and pounded them.

Then we took the skins off the tomatoes and also pounded them with the other ingredients.

With the jeow ready, except for some chopped spring onions and coriander - which we sprinkled over the final dish, we started the laap.

First we made the dry fried rice powder - frying rice and some slivers of kaffir lime leaves till very well done, then pounding them in a pestle and mortar.

We then chopped some pork shoulder finely and fried it with some garlic.

We added some fish sauce - traditionally Pa Dek - Lao fermented fish, but the choice was Nam Pa, although other options are Vietnamese fish sauce or soy sauce.

We also added a spoon of the dry fried rice powder we'd made earlier.

Then we finely chopped some spring onions and mint and tossed that through.

In order to make the meatballs from this laap, we added egg and flour and shaped the laap into balls. We fried these.

Heated up the jeow and poured it over.

And then sprinkled the herbs on top, before eating.